And that was just the news – campaign research offices also deal with legislative votes, contributions (mostly kept in spreadsheets or databases), financial information, web pages, text of bills, press releases – all sorts of information.

Financial engineering and acquisition integration when it comes to new and old media assets is the bomb, as you plot how to blend assets, what prices to pay, and the war of negotiation, tied into kick ass expense accounts, remuneration as well as equity and fixed cash upside. (compared to a startup where u have a vbig equity stake and need to pain/bootstrap valuation as far as possible for as long as possible before going to next level - you also dont have to rely on technical systems, other than macros in spreadsheets and some of the new fandangled ways of reading encrypted documents and not making copies, circulating them etc as detailed in paper yesterday for the PBL deal)

This is a much faster and more visual understanding of the data than the old way of downloading spreadsheets, which is the way you still have to look to find, for example, that in January Saudi Arabia had 46 rigs drilling for oil, and 28 drilling for natural gas.